"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden (poetry reading)

The most moving love poem I have read: "love's austere and lonely offices" is so simple and succinct that rarely has so much been expressed in so few words.

"Austere" means severely self-disciplined, enduring hardship for a higher purpose.. "Offices" are duties, actions which go with a role, in this case the role of a loving father. The purpose of love is what it motivates a person to do for another with no expectation of anything in return. He received no thanks and expected none.

I apologise for departing from my usual sotto voce with this uncharacteristic effusion.

He grew up in a poor district of Detroit, he had a hard childhood, his sight was impaired. He was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the first festival of Negro Arts in 1966.

Nonviolent Communication Part 1 Marshall Rosenberg

Marshall Rosenberg created Nonviolent Communication and is Founder and Director of Educational Services for the Center for Nonviolent Communication, an international non-profit organization based in California.

Dr Rosenberg talks about Teilhard de Chardin's theories of human evolution which sought to return to a more natural way - one where no-one advances at the expense of another. He speaks of his own experiences working with Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and how enriching the lives of others is the most rewarding work mankind can engage in.

Marshall Rosenberg is so very cool.

the Center for Nonviolent Communication, www.cnvc.org

Eckhart tolle Power of now 1

Eckhart tolle This is The Power of now please bare with me, while I upload the rest of the book. He is the reader of this book, as well as the writer.

Fields of Peace

I dreamed of a field of peace, beyond the mountains of right and wrong, across the sea of judgment, where with each other we can be at peace.

The Stalin Epigram by Osip Mandelstam

Did you hear Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem? As Osip Mandelstam said, "Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" In fact, Mandelstam's anti-state, anti-establishment poetry got him put into a government gulag for "counter-revolutionary activities," where he died an early death, cause, of course, unknown. A true inaugural poem then, one for the ages rather than for the moment & for the state:


Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

The Edge of the World

As I sail into the open ocean

These words I hear:

You’re going to fall off the edge of the world.

Are not me, but implanted in me,

for me to lose.

LIFE ON THE BORDER..

I AM ON THE BORDERLINE...

...OF RESTLESSNESS...

... AND PEACE...

...CONTAINMENT...

...AND BOUNDLESSNESS...

... HEAVEN AND HELL...

...EARTH...

...AND SKY...

...LIFE...

...AND DEATH...

ARE IN A CONSTANTANT STATE OF FLUX AND

...SHIFTING SANDS...

... AND SINKING MUD...

...ARE MY UNSTEADY PLATFORMS...

...I NEED ROOTS...

...TO ANCHOR ME...

...AND FEED ME,

...ANGLES TO COMFORT ME...

...AND SHELTER ME FROM THE WIND...

...I DO NOT KNOW WHERE YOU BEGIN...

...AND I END...
...SIMPLE SECRETS I DO NOT UNDERSTAND...

... ASK ME THE MYSTERIES...

... OF THE OCEAN...

... AND I WILL WISPER THEM...

...TO YOU SOFTLY...

...AND YET I KNOW NOT...

...HOW TO FIND MY WAY HOME.

Mystic Message

This is from an old screen saver that I found on a YouTube video. Even the strong and needless connection to God can't ruin it. I tried to cull the religious excess, but eventually decided to just get into it as it is, I hope you can too.The message itself is provoking, powerful and personally timely.

The line that cuts me down is this:

It takes only seconds to open profound wounds in the ones we love, that take years to heal

Interview With God

I dreamed I had an interview with God...
"So you would like to interview me?"
God asked...
"If you have the time" - I said.
God smiled.
"My time is eternity... ...what questions do you have
in mind for me?"

What surprises you most about human kind?

God answered
That they get bored with childhood,they rush to grow up, and then long to be children again.

That they lose their health to make money
and then lose their money to restore their health.

That by thinking anxiously about the
future, they forget the present, such that they live in
neither the present nor the future.

That they live as if they will never die,
and die as trough they had never lived.

Gods hand took mine and we were silent
for awhile

And than I asked:

As a parent,what are some of life's lessons You want your children to learn?

To learn they cannot make
anyone love them.

All they can do is let
themselves be loved.

To learn that it is not good to compare
themselves to others.

To learn to forgive by practicing forgiveness.

To learn that it only takes a few seconds to open profound wounds in those they love,
and it can take many years to heal them.

To learn that a rich person is not one who has the most, but is one who needs the least.

To learn that there are people who love them dearly,but simply do not yet know how to express or show their feelings.

To learn that two people can look at the same thing and see it differently.

To learn that it is not enough that they forgive one another,but they must also forgive themselves.

Thank you for your time!

- I said humbly.

Is there anything else you'd like your children to
know?

God smiled and said
Just know that I am here..always.

Geri's Shadow

Casts its pall over us all, in the

Darkness unseen, we dance on invisible stings plucked decades
Before our birth who's negative resonance

Pits us one against all, all against each other.

We who are strangers, who are family, are friends at our cores,

Are who fight to her unseen, unseeing delight.

Our mother, a lonely little girl, grew up

In the frigid shade of a Witch mother, but

Some flowers never blossom in the cold,

A child never blooms under the penumbra of another,

We will never until we rise above

Geri's Shadow

Inside Out...

But if I do you will always push me away, splitting me and leaving me broken like you.

The Fall of The Jousha Tree

you went riding with me to Joshua Tree, where

i alluded to loving you in the cool shade of the Skull Rock mounds

you escaped me there so

i had to slow down for

you kept taking pictures of me by a Joshua Tree

i was growing trust in

you casually cut my bruised tree to its damaged core that

i tried to save, falling, catching it with a bare palm, seeing

you splitting bathed in the desert blood like light

i felt pouring from every part of me, watching

you leaving and leaving nothing of me, except on the bloody thorn of the Joshua tree.

What She Left Me.

we make our most important decisions unknowing, our most fatal mistakes without hesitation.

unforgiven for the least offense, we trade life long enduring pain for fleeting moments of
closeness, destine already to leave,
leaving you broken.

the chance you thought was yours like words
spoken in anger, you can never take back,
and all the bitter heartbreak to come isn't
worth that single moment lost forever,
that is all she left me.

The Waif

You are to blame for what I've become, You

who abandoned me, wounding me, forever
Traveling from border to borderline between comfortable numbness and stark despair
Alone in my life have I become

Distant and disconnected from the mother who could not love you, condemned you to feel unlovable, to find love, but not joy, to give love, but not keep it: keeping your distance instead you kept it vague, until you faltered and fled, and abandoned us all.

A little girl alone with her witch mother,

-UNIMAGINABLE!-

Her anguished childhood, lost, to the terror of war,

Sharing only her sorrow and shame I see her enduring what I could not have survived,

But you, a frail little girl were resilient, it took her time to break you.

Helpless to help, comprehended, or forget the little girl I never knew, Who haunts me, following me, She leads

teaching me, that

Love's not what you give, it's who you lose,

keeping only no one to lose I follow her,

losing her, losing her,

I am lost

Loving now only those who won't let me in I keep them out.

Keeping only what was never mine I have lost no one,

losing no one, living alone.

Skyline

There's a city out there

he wants to be part of .

Skyscrapers jagged edges

etch their way across his mind,

from the tenement top

he tries to touch them.

Leaning an inch, two, three,

too far, he's falling ,

Falling frantically

pinwheeling arms

throw him back to try again,

in desperation that drives him,

and again, until fatigue defeats him.

Then with arms hugging folded knees in despair,

he watches darkness descending

on a dimming distant skyline.

7-2-80

Desperate Loner

When I was a kid,
it was easy to be like Eastwood,
a dangerous loner on the trail,
No one to stop my aimless drifting.
When life seems more real than dangerous
faces more mundane than bad,
It's easy to be what only Eastwood
could understand, off in search of some dusty trail
to die somewhere, a desperate loner.

9-24-80

Memories..........

This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a place called you to return, although you do not recognize the voice, nor what it is the voice reminds you of. Yet still you feel an alien here, from somewhere all unknown. Nothing so definite that you could say with certainty you are in exile here. Just a peristent feeling, sometimes not more than a tiny throb, at other times hardly remembered, actively dismissed, but surely to return to mind again.........

A Mystic Musing from
Unknown

Never

I found love letters

written long ago

To see them there not knowing

I could think nothing has changed.

The words haven't, they bring me back,

us back , together.

The sight of you, your touch

They bring me back.

Never again.

CIPHER IN THE SNOW

How does a stranger I know come to be someone I'll never forget? How long taking you for granted does it take to see how much more you are? How deep does the sorrow grow when suddenly I realize that I was forever too late?

It started with tragedy on a biting cold February morning. I was driving behind the Milford Corners bus as I did most snowy mornings on my way to school. It veered and stopped short at the hotel, which it had no business doing, and I was annoyed as I had to come to an unexpected stop. A boy lurched out of the bus, reeled, stumbled, and collapsed on the snowbank at the curb. The bus driver and I reached him at the same moment. His thin, hollow face was white even against the snow.
“He’s dead,” the driver whispered.
It didn't register for a minute. I glanced quickly at the scared young faces staring down at us from the school bus. “A doctor! Quick! I’ll phone from the hotel….”
“No use, I tell you he’s dead.” The driver looked down at the boy’s still form. “He never even said he felt bad,” he muttered. “Just tapped me on the shoulder and said, real quiet, ‘I’m sorry. I have to get off at the hotel.’ That’s all. Polite and apologizing like.”
At school, the giggling, shuffling morning noise quieted as the news went down the halls. I passed a huddle of girls. “Who was it? Who dropped dead on the way to school?” I heard one of them half-whisper.
“Don’t know his name; some kid from Milford Corners” was the reply.
It was like that in the faculty room and the principal’s office. “I’d appreciate your going out to tell the parents,” the principal told me. “They haven’t a phone and, anyway, somebody from school should go there in person. I’ll cover your classes.”
“Why me?” I asked. “Wouldn't it be better if you did it?”
“I didn't know the boy,” the principal admitted levelly. “And, in last year’s sophomore personalities column I note that you were listed as his favorite teacher.”
I drove through the snow and cold down the bad canyon road to the Evans place and thought about the boy, Cliff Evans. His favorite teacher! I thought. He hasn't spoken two words to me in two years! I could see him in my mind’s eye all right, sitting back there in the last seat in my afternoon literature class. He came in the room by himself and left by himself. “Cliff Evans,” I muttered to myself, “a boy who never talked.” I thought a minute. “A boy who never smiled. I never saw him smile once.”
The big ranch kitchen was clean and warm. I blurted out my news somehow. Mrs. Evans reached blindly toward a chair. “He never said anything about bein’ ailing.”
His stepfather snorted. “He ain't said nothin' about anything since I moved in here.”
Mrs. Evans pushed a pan to the back of the stove and began to untie her apron. “Now hold on,” her husband snapped. “I got to have breakfast before I go to town. Nothin' we can do now anyway. If Cliff hadn't been so dumb, he’d have told us he didn't feel good.”
After school I sat in the office and stared blankly at the records spread out before me. I was to close the file and write the obituary for the school paper. The almost bare sheets mocked the effort. Cliff Evans, white, never legally adopted by stepfather, five young half-brothers and sisters. These meager strands of information and list of D grades were all the records had to offer.
Cliff Evans had silently come in the school door in the mornings and gone out the school door in the evenings, and that was all. He had never belonged to a club. He had never played on a team. He had never held an office. As far as I could tell he had never done one happy, noisy kid thing. He had never been anybody at all.
How do you go about making a boy into a zero? The grade-school records showed me. The first and second grade teachers’ annotations read “sweet, shy child,” “timid but eager.” Then the third grade note had opened the attack. Some teacher had written in a good, firm hand, “Cliff won’t talk. Uncooperative. Slow learner.” The other academic sheep had followed with “dull”, “slow-witted”; “low I.Q.” They became correct. The boy’s I.Q. score in the ninth grade was listed as 83. But his I.Q. score in the third grade had been 106. The score didn't go under 100 until the seventh grade. Even shy, timid, sweet children have resilience. It takes time to break them.
I stomped to the typewriter and wrote a savage report pointing out what education had done to Cliff Evans. I slapped a copy on the principal’s desk and another in the sad, dog-eared file. I banged the typewriter and slammed the file and crashed the door shut, but I didn't feel much better. A little boy kept walking after me, a little boy with a peaked, pale face; a skinny body in faded jeans; and big eyes that had looked and searched for a long time and then had become veiled.
I could guess how many times he’s been chosen last to play sides in a game, how many whispered child conversations had excluded him, how many times he hadn't been asked. I could see and hear the faces and voices that said over and over, “You’re a nothing, Cliff Evans.”
A child is a believing creature. Cliff undoubtedly believed them. Suddenly it seemed clear to me: When finally there was nothing left at all for Cliff Evans, he collapsed on a snowbank and went away. The doctor might list “heart failure” as the cause of death, but that wouldn't change my mind.
We couldn't find ten students in the school who had known Cliff well enough to attend the funeral as his friends. So the student body officers and a committee from the junior class went a s a group to the church, being politely sad. I attended the services with them, and sat through it with a lump of cold lead in my chest and a big resolve growing through me.
I've never forgotten Cliff Evans nor that resolve. He has been my challenge year after year, class after class. I look for veiled eyes or bodies scrouged into a seat in an alien world. “Look, kids,” I say silently, “I may not do anything else for you this year, but not one of you is going to come out of here a nobody. I’ll work or fight to the bitter end doing battle with society and the school board, but I won’t have one of you coming out of here thinking himself a zero.”
Most of the time – not always, but most of the time – I've succeeded.

A true story. “Cipher in the snow” by Jean Mizer from Today’s Education, November, 1964

ARMCHAIR QUARTERBACK

If you can dream and not make dreams your master ...
R. Kipling

He's an Armchair Quarterback,
the best in the league
He's played in every Superbowl
and won some in overtime.
He's handed it off to Czonka
and thrown touchdowns to Swann.
This Sunday afternoon
He'll be the winner again.

But when the game is over
he feels the years catching up.
An open field runner, running out of gas
Too many hits,
warm six packs take their toll

Battling into twilight a table lamp by the armchair spots the room,
six o'clock sports lull him to sleep of future seasons, dreams and glory
Where dreams of glory are all that's real.

12-79

Passing

Passing road signs on the way away,

Interstate billboards of names of

nameless towns.

Passing in the night their innocuity,

dreams, injustices and triumphs

And the one with the love just for me.

Passing, ...

3-11-1981

The Storm

I listened to the shrieking wind

violently protesting

Screaming obscenities at me,

Thunder angrily bellowing,

Furious monstrous waves

crashing insistently

Against the stubborn sea wall

As the storm raged

wild within me.

_

Debbie May 26, 1980

Amber Rose

The gallant Gesture,

an Amber Rose.

A moonlit promenade

On a soft starry night

Innocent upturned lips awaiting that princely kiss.

Fairytale portraits full of endless dreams.

Debbie
Written in memory of march 14, 1980

5-21-1980

The One That Got Away

I almost had her.
Save for the grace a year holds
she would be mine.
Now who ever I find
Whatever she may be
I'll spend my time regretting,
the one that got away.

3-24-1981

Nixon

Nixon 80 it said

in spray paint black graffiti

against the stark white concrete flyover.

Appropriate

The author would perhaps have

Attila the Hun Vice President, with

Hitler and Stalin in Cabinet?

Were the Seventies in vain?



8-8-1980

FATIGUE MAKES COWARDS OF US ALL

" Fatigue makes cowards of us all "
_______________V. Lombardi

When I was a kid a master of dreams
it was easy to be Courageous
a Champion for the common cause.

Reality's causes too mundane
for heroes made dreams
the master of me.
Dreams make fools of wise men
fatigue cowards of us all.

7-16-79